I used to see Rasmus around Y! a lot when I was roaming the halls there. He always seemed insightful and down to earth despite being quite well known. I'll be interested to see what he ends up doing next.
I worked with Rasmus at Linuxcare, and he's a great guy, even if I am not so enthusiastic about PHP. By any definition though, PHP was a good 'hack' at the time it came out: it solved a real problem that nothing else was solving adequately.
However I'd say he's directly responsible for the misery the most PHP development now is.
If he actually spent time reading about languages and designing his own, he would throw in function namespacing and function naming conventions and a good built-in abstraction for database access (with a strong bias against SQL injections and towards placeholders/variable binding from the day one), PHP would come out an okayish language and not an universal hate target.
There are some other blunders that he could just not make. And I'm not even dreaming about template system that makes sense now.
He didn't! Who the hell could do that if he wasn't going.
Maybe if people who spent time knowing a lot about good language design spent some time making their languages practical, we wouldn't be in this situation either;-)
I think Ruby and Python are reasonable examples of languages that make good compromises; they have some nice language features, but they are eminently usable for real world problems as well. Also, they are fairly approachable, even for people who are not CS majors.
Ramsus wanted to create a simple 'glue' language that was approachable and did the job done without any layers of abstraction that web framework like Zend and Symfony have. And he has stuck to his guns till today.
Therein lies one of my regrets: Tcl was out there and was already quite a nice 'simple glue language' that to this day remains more powerful and flexible than PHP in some ways. It's too bad the early Tcl/web systems were proprietary until too late:
I try hard not to say that somebody is 'wrong', believing that different opinions are important - but your ranting about PHP is ill-informed at best, and outright wrong at worst.
What Lerdorf developed was initially a collection of C macro's and functions to make repetitive tasks for web application development easier. If you were developing web applications at the time, which I can safely assume you were not, since your arguments are restrained to comparisons with dev platforms popularized in the past few years, you would realize why the initial popularity of PHP and how it was developed makes sense. It allowed a lot of developers (read: most) with a C background to easily churn out buzzy web applications.
The Zend engine, was not developed by Lerdorf. It was hackish, simple but extremely fast because of mod_php and a decent vm. Combine that with the C syntax and easy administration and you have the core reasons why PHP blew out to be a raging success. As much as one may or may not like something, you do have to recognize that most things become popular for very good reasons - and bitching about them usually means that you are either a) smarter than the collective intelligence of the rest of the world, or b) ignorant.
Now to your points, they are just wrong. PHP has no concept of routing, that is what a web server does. One PHP file per page is also not true, again you are confusing two different things. There is also no 'default templating', I can pipe to, or make PHP calls from the command line. A programming language doesn't need templating outside of 'include' (which isn't a language thing - its an interpreter thing, but lets not get too deep).
So chill out for a moment and appreciate that what Rasmus achieved with PHP is by most measures a success, has a very important place in the web and web history, and like BASIC, Pascal, etc. before it was an important impetus for a whole new generation of people picking up programming.
"most things become popular for very good reasons"
Sure. But those reasons are gone. Long gone. So please, wrap it out already.
"that is what a web server does"
Did. Most PHP apps don't use /some-article.php and /another-article.php with relevant PHP files under those names, that would be bizzare. There surely is A routing FRAMEWORK those days.
"One PHP file per page is also not true"
...if you're using A FRAMEWORK.
"There is also no 'default templating', I can pipe to, or make PHP calls from the command line"
So what? There's still default templating outside <? ?>
And that's what you use unless you've got A FRAMEWORK.
Do you see a pattern here? The pattern is that you didn't read my comment, you used regexes instead. Sadly.
But it still has 1000+ functions in the default namespace?
And every file still starts with <?
And if one of them doesn't, then your web app would fail epically because you were gzipping your output into your output stream (one and only one), and this extra space in one of files ruined your gzip.
To be fair, it's wonderful that complex PHP apps ever work. It's a complete surprise to me, I'd say they run-by-accident.
Even if you dislike PHP, its undeniable what he's contributed to web development. Best of luck, Rasmus and thank you.